Photographer Dorothea Lange pictured in Texas, circa 1934. Paul S. Taylor.
Two ambitious photographic proposals from graduate students at UC Berkeley Journalism to document the lives of women in the American South and rural China have been honored in the annual campus-wide Dorothea Lange Fellowship competition.
The $4,000 fellowship, established in the late 1980s at UC Berkeley in memory of one of the 20th century’s most gifted documentary photographers, celebrates the use of photography by students or faculty members in scholarly work of any discipline. Honorable Mention recipients receive $1,000.
“Reva and David Logan Photojournalism Professor Ken Light has spent more than 40 years building a program that is a great source of pride to us, the campus and the field,” said Dean Michael D. Bolden. “It’s especially meaningful when our graduate students are honored with the Lange Fellowships.”
“This year’s competitors submitted very thought-provoking proposals with strong photographic samples, even by the highest industry standards,” Ken Light said. “After two hours of closely re-examining the photos and the voracity of the proposals, plus a very lively discussion,” the judging committee finally arrived at a winner.
Professor Ken Light
Sophia Cutino’s (‘26) “Southern Girls” is a documentary photography project chronicling how Mississippi lesbians preserve their community, identity and history as anti-LGBTQ+ legislation proliferates and institutional support vanishes.
The project follows Dorothea Lange’s documentary tradition of empathetic, place-specific work illuminating marginalized lives under social pressure. The goal is to create an intimate, complex portrait of a dignified community and not just hostile conditions.
Like Lange, these images will focus on the individual as a whole, putting faces, names, and stories to those almost completely left out of history. The images, she says, will “call attention to the discrepancy between the idea of Mississippi and the reality of the people who live there…people who refuse to be suppressed by legislation and deserve to be remembered.”
“Receiving this fellowship is a great honor,” said Cutino, a queer woman who describes Dorothea Lange as a foremother whose work is essential for all female documentary photographers. “To be recognized as following in the footsteps of such a legendary documentary photographer is incredibly inspiring as I embark on this trip through Mississippi. With collaboration and empathy, I will be photographing the love, joy and compassion lesbians are able to create in a hostile environment, demonstrating much-needed representation of what queer life looks like outside of metropolitan cities and to counteract stereotypical conceptions of those who live here.”
Seven Wu (’26) plans to document “through portraits and quiet observational scenes,” the continuum of female AI labor across and surrounding Lingshi, China, and in the country’s largest technology hubs. Wu’s objective is to trace how invisible human judgment forms the backbone of artificial intelligence and to restore visibility to workers who have been pushed to the margins of public consciousness.
Seven Wu
“These women are not concerned with grand national narratives, but with whether they can finish today’s workload before school ends, whether this income allows a measure of independence, and whether their children might one day leave a forgotten town,” Wu said.
As a visual journalist focusing on women’s stories in China, Wu is committed to moving beyond stereotypes. “Growing up in China, I came to understand how women’s identities are often confined to being someone’s wife, daughter, or mother, while their own aspirations and struggles are obscured by patriarchy and official narratives of progress,” she said. “While staying with these mothers, I learned that AI is not an abstract concept for them — it appears as spreadsheets of piece-rate wages, a small act of resistance in stepping outside the kitchen, and a window to the outside world shaped by algorithms their children scroll through on TikTok.”
This year’s fellows competition was judged by Drew Johnson, curator of photography and visual culture at the Oakland Museum of California; Professor Karen Nakamura, a cultural and visual anthropologist at UC Berkeley; Photographer and UC Berkeley Professor of Society and Environment Nancy Lee Peluso; Professor Ken Light and alum April Martin (’24). April is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and is a photographer and filmmaker as well as a community activist in West Oakland.
Over the last 40 years, 32 journalism students have been named Lange Fellows in UC Berkeley’s most prestigious photojournalism competition. Our instructors have also been honored. In 1987, Professor Ken Light was the first person associated with the J-School to receive the award. Former photography lecturer Mimi Chakarova won the fellowship in 2003, and former Professor Richard Koci Hernandez received the award in 2016.
Upon completion of their project, each winning Lange Fellow will submit two prints that become part of the permanent collection of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
About the Fellows
Sophia Cutino (’26) is a documentary photographer, filmmaker and journalist currently pursuing her master’s in journalism at UC Berkeley.
Since receiving her BA in Culture and Media from The New School in 2023, her reporting and photography has been published by SFGate, KQED, and Oakland North. Her debut photo book, Diaries of a Wet Bird (Sunstroke Press, 2025), explores queer intimacy and has been featured in DAZED, The Luna Collective, Photo London Fair, and Photo Book Journal.
Seven Wu (’26) is a documentary filmmaker and visual journalist. She previously worked at The Paper and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work focuses on ethnographic and social justice storytelling, with a particular emphasis on women and labor. She tells stories from diverse communities around the world — from the unclaimed dead in San Francisco to indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea, from youth pop culture artists in Uganda to female migrant workers in China.
Her documentary and photography work has received awards and nominations from the China Academy Awards of Documentary Film and the Beijing International Film Festival, and has been featured in The Paper, ABC News, The Boston Globe, Bilibili, and Oakland North.
-Marlena Telvick
